Modern facilities for handling lactating animals, particularly cows, usually include a free stall barn in combination with a milking parlor. The free stall barn includes many bedding stalls, separated by dividers. Each bedding stall preferably includes deep bedding material because it is the most comfortable surface for a lactating animal, particularly a cow, to lie on. Clean, comfortable bedding material usually results in a healthy and productive milked animal. To maintain the bedding material clean and comfortable, the bedding material must be well-maintained, which typically requires a considerable amount of labor. The labor, which is performed after the animals have been taken to the milking parlor, includes hand cleaning and grooming with a rake or the use of power tools. A reliable source of good bedding material must also be frequently added, usually manually. These chores are performed by a person who is also responsible for herding the animals from the bedding stalls to milking stalls in the milking parlor; such a person is frequently referred to as a cow chaser.
In traditional milking facilities, the cow chaser urges a group of cows from bedding stalls in a pen, to which the cows in the group are assigned, to the milking parlor. The cows assigned to a particular group have similar characteristics, such as recently given birth to a calf or high fat content milk. Traditional, non-robotic, parlors are designed to simultaneously milk cows of one group at a time, followed by the simultaneous milking of cows of a second group, and so on until all cows to be milked have been processed. The cow chaser sequentially goes to each pen in the barn to sequentially fetch each group of cows from the different pens to the parlor. After milking, the cow chaser returns the cows of each group to the pen in the barn to which the cows in the group are assigned. To perform these chores, the cow chaser must open and close many gates in the barn and parlor for each group of animals. While the cows of each group are being milked, the cow chaser is expected to clean and refurbish the bedding stalls of the pen to which the cows in the group being milked are assigned. Refurbishing usually involves removing some bedding material, adding new bedding material and fluffing the bedding material.
The requirement for group movement causes inefficiency because the cow chaser's manual operations often are erroneous particularly during movement of the animals; a common error is failure to open and close the gates correctly. Another disadvantage of group movement is that animals are moved in a queue, which often causes cow slipping and falling. In addition, the cows are frequently stressed by waiting a long time in a queue to reach the milking stalls. All of these adverse experiences reduce milk productivity.
After milking, the cows in a group are encouraged to eat, drink, lie down and chew their cuds at a feed bunk located between the parlor and the bedding stalls The feed bunk must include, for each cow in the group, a free stall having sufficient room for these activities as well as for water bowls. The feed bunks inefficiently use space in the barn.
At some time, any individual cow must be sorted (i. e., removed) from its assigned group for various activities, such as treatment or breeding. The sorted animals go through selectively opened and closed gates into a sort pen after leaving the parlor. After the activity has been performed in the sort pen, the animal goes through another set of selectively opened and closed gates to bedding stalls of its assigned group. The cow chaser performs these gate opening and closing operations, sometimes in an erroneous manner which contributes to inefficient operation.
Modern milking facilities avoid many of these inefficiencies by relying on the fact that most lactating animals, particularly cows, go from their free stall bedding stalls to milking stalls of milking parlors on a regular, frequently periodic, basis because of their own desire to be milked. However, a small percentage of lactating animals, particularly cows, do not go to the milking parlor in a timely manner. The animals that do not go to the milking parlor of their own volition must be urged to do so by a cow chaser, resulting in some of the inefficiencies of the traditional milking facilities.
Johansson et al., U.S. Pat. No. 8,402,919 attempts to resolve the problems associated with cows not going to the milking parlor of their own volition by using a computer controlled movable partition in each of plural resting areas of a milking facility including a milking area and a space consuming feeding area. The partition in each resting area periodically traverses an alley of its associated resting area to periodically drive the cows from the resting area to the milking area. In the embodiment of FIG. 1, a complex gate arrangement guides the cows from the space consuming feeding area to the resting area. The cows in the resting area are free to go to any of several milking stalls so there is no attempt to separate the milk from different groups of cows. In the embodiment of FIG. 2, the cows in the resting area are not separated into groups, but are directed to different milking areas by a complex gate arrangement. In the FIG. 3 embodiment, the cows in different resting areas are confined to certain milking stalls by a complex gate arrangement, which can be changed depending on the relative number of cows ready to be milked in each resting area. After the cows have been milked, they return to the same resting area that they originally left, after eating at a feed table in the feed area. The cows' return to the resting areas is impeded by cows leaving the rest area to go to the milking stalls.